Or

Comment: Simply Brit: We have dispatched from our UK warehouse books of good condition to over 1 million satisfied customers worldwide. We are committed to providing you with a reliable and efficient service at all times.

Prepare to be amazed and educated! A Bee in a Cathedral explains basic scientific truths and principles using the power of analogy. Using classic comparisons (including 'bee in the cathedral' which dramatically conveys the size of the atomic nucleus in relation to the atom as a whole) you will learn: how whirlpools and hurricanes help us understand the formation of galaxies; how DNA chains act just like a zipper; how much blood is produced by a body each day.

Written in an entertaining style, A Bee in a Cathedral will appeal to anyone with a thirst for knowledge and an appreciation for science. The aim of the book is to convey basic principles of science in new and exciting ways, describing the unbelievably massive, the inconceivably tiny, and the unfathomably complex in terms that we can all understand, and comparing them to everyday objects and experiences with which we are much more familiar.

Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Product description

Review

Serious but engaging look at scientific facts and principles using analogy. Angels and Urchins

About the Author

Joel Levy is a writer and journalist specializing in science and history. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Newton's Notebook, Scientific Feuds: From Galileo to the Human Genome Project, Poison: An Illustrated History, and The Bedside Book of Chemistry. He has also written features and articles for the British press, and has appeared on national television and numerous local and national radio shows. A long-term student of the history of science and medicine, Joel has a BSc in Biological Sciences and an MA in Psychology.

Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon.com

Amazon.com:
3.8 out of 5 stars
8 reviews

15 people found this helpful.

2.0 out of 5 starsWanted to like it

Bywiredweirdon 16 January 2012 - Published on Amazon.com

Verified Purchase

This book's great review in Science magazine stirred my interest, so I went ahead and got it. I rationalized that it would be a gift for soemone I had in mind, but it was OK if I read it first. That I did, and quite enjoyed its mind-bending analogies between the spectacular and the mundane. It explores quantum entanglement, the energy released by hurricanes, the length of a strand of living DNA, and many other wonders of the natural and man-made worlds. Along the way, sidebars and insets add background information and factoids, like the temperature of the Boomerang Nebula (the coldest spot in space) or the time it takes for the atoms in a human body to be replaced by natural growth and turnover.

Early on, though, a few things started to nag. Page 21, for example discusses realtivity. A sidebar mentions the cumulative effects of acceleration at 1g - increasing your speed at that rate, you'd reach the speed of light in just under a year. The thing is, though, you wouldn't. Relativistic effects would kick in long before that, preventing any material body from reaching that speed. Page 43 refers to "1 kilowatt per hour" - a unit of measurement nearly meaningless in that context, since kilowatts already have a "per hour" term silently built in. P.93 asserts that "Even the biggest molecules are microscopic on a human scale." A DNA molecule, although it might have a macroscopic length of several centimeters, remains invisible because of it atomic-scale width. But diamond is covalently bound carbon, so a single diamond crystal of visible size really is one molecule. Likewise, molecules of phenolic plastics (like "bakelite"), which polymerize promiscuously, can grow to visible size. A bakelite dinner plate, for example, might be one huge, branched, winding molecule. P.103 equates temperatures of 113C to 171F and 121C to 186F - obvious bloopers, since 100C (212F) is the boiling point of water.

The list doesn't end there, but I hope you get the idea. A book like this has value only to the extent that it gets the facts straight. This one fails just often enough to leave me uneasy about the rest. If I saw that many outright errors (and lots more points that require careful interpretation), how many did I miss? I really wanted to like this book and did like big parts of it. Now, though, I hesitate to give it to a child who might not be able to read it as critically as it needs to be read.

I was hoping for a book filled pages like the first few...simple analogies that I can use to convey science ideas in my business speeches. The book is pretty to look at but some of the analogies are a bit vague and some of the material is presented in a very confusing way.

I loved the billiard table in the dark. It analogizes that if a ball moves in a particular direction, we could figure out that something struck that ball and from what direction it was struck. But the rocket and the elevator is a mess---a subject I well understand yet I could barely make sense of the words.

I was amused for about an hour. Now, it might be picked up up occasionally or a "fun fact". My main criteria for a 5 star book is this: Would I buy a few as gifts? In this case, no.